Temperance, Colonial Power and Historical Disagreement — Reading Schrad

The Short Version

Who controlled the liquor trade, and who paid the price? Mark Lawrence Schrad uses that question to challenge familiar accounts of temperance. His global history emphasizes resistance to exploitative commerce and the governments that protected it.

What Schrad Argues

In Smashing the Liquor Machine, Schrad argues that many temperance movements cannot be understood simply as powerful people policing the habits of weaker groups. He emphasizes reformers seeking protection from a profitable trade, including movements outside the United States.

His discussion of Gandhi connects opposition to liquor with resistance to colonial power. The focus is political and economic as well as personal: who benefited from the trade, which authorities sustained it and how communities challenged it.

Schrad explicitly criticizes interpretations by Daniel Okrent and Lisa McGirr. That disagreement belongs in the history. Reading these books together does not make their conclusions identical.

Compare Three Stages

This comparison is an Academy reading method. It helps identify what each argument explains without pretending the historians agree.

Read the Argument Critically

An emancipatory aim does not prove fair enforcement or a successful outcome. Abusive enforcement does not establish that every earlier reformer wanted those abuses. Test the actors, mechanisms and differences connecting the stages.

Schrad’s international comparisons broaden the question; they do not make every national case interchangeable. The selected passages establish his argument and disagreement, not independent confirmation of every archival example or a universal verdict on Prohibition.

Source and Locators

Mark Lawrence Schrad, Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition (Oxford University Press, 2021). Introduction, printed pp. 5–14 (PDF sheets 30–39); Gandhi discussion, printed pp. 196–198 (PDF sheets 221–223), in the 753-sheet digital copy.

Publisher’s book record — bibliography and access options; full text may require a purchase or library access.

Try the Historian’s Question

A community campaigns to protect household income from liquor sellers. Officials later enforce the resulting law unfairly. Which part of the story does each piece of evidence explain?

Return to Prohibition and Repeal for the full lesson, or The History of Bourbon and Other American Whiskies to choose another period.